Grades

Coleen Murtagh Paratore

CURRENT CITY

Albany

CURRENT STATE/PROVIDENCE

New York

CURRENT COUNTRY

United States of America

Coleen Murtagh Paratore is the author of the wildly successful The Wedding Planner's Daughter, The Cupid Chronicles, and Willa by Heart. Her most recent title is Sunny Holiday.

Coleen graduated from The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY with a degree in Communications. She then worked at a public relations/advertising firm while working towards her master's degree in English at Trinity College. After she earned this degree, she became first a publicist at Russell Sage College in Troy and then the Director of Communications for the Sage Colleges. She also created The Remembering Book, an heirloom quality tribute to her best friend.

After her three sons, Christopher, Connor, and Dylan, were born, she became a full-time mother. "I wrote a song for each of my sons," says Coleen, "and sang their special songs to them as bedtime lullabies." She also read extensively with them. "We devoured books together, morning, noon and night," she explains. "We'd fill an L.L. Bean sack full of picture books every week, snuggle up on the couch, and read, read, read. I didn't know it at the time, but in addition to it being enormously FUN, this was fabulous research. As I was devoting my best creative energy to my children and sharing my love of books with them, I was soaking in lessons in characterization and plot and structure and language... feeding my writer's voice in happy hibernation."

It took Coleen a while to enter the world of children's publishing. "I wrote stories for four years before I felt the work was ready," she says. "And then, once my writing was of publishable quality, it took two years of submitting before I got a contract."